> If CUDA isn't that strong of a moat/tie-in and Chinese tech companies can seemingly reasonably migrate to these chips, why hasn't AMD been able to compete more aggressively with nVidia on a US/global scale when they had a much longer head start?

It's all about investment. If you are a random company you don't want to sink millions in figuring out how to use AMD so you apply the tried an true "no one gets fired for buying Nvidia".

If you are an authoritarian state with some level of control over domestic companies, that calculus does not exist. You can just ban Nvidia chips and force to learn how to use the new thing. By using the new thing an ecosystem gets built around it.

It's the beauty of centralized controlled in the face of free markets and I don't doubt that it will pay-off for them.

I think they'd be entirely fine just using NVIDIA, and most of the push came from US itself trying to ban export (or "export", as NVIDIA cards are put together in the china factories...).

Also AMD really didn't invest enough in making their software experience as nice as NVIDIA.

Are there precedents where an authoritarian state outperformed the free market in technological innovation?

Or would china be different because it's a mix of market and centralized rule?